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Module 15 - Part 2: Explorations and Exercises

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 1: Overview  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

Oratory and Oral Performance in Pre-Modern Africa and the Americas

To respond to these exercises, it helps to have some appreciation of the cultural assumptions explored in them. Click on Web Resources for further insights into the way ideas about the human and divine in each culture colors the literary texts that we are studying.

These questions are arranged into three color-coded categories.

Level A invites you to look closely at some specific aspects of individual texts. Answering these questions shows that you have read carefully and understand the significance of important words and ideas as they appear in context.

Level B asks you to think more deeply about the implications of some of the details that you have isolated.

Level C allows you to build on the findings of the first two categories to theorize broadly about the relationship of the text to social and historical forces beyond the work itself.

Topics in this module's Exploration and Exercises section include:

Focus on The Florentine Codex

Level A

  1. Examine the names by which the woman who died in childbirth is addressed and compare them to those used to the woman who has delivered her baby.  How do they reflect the world of the Aztecs?  
  2. What role does time play in this oration?
  3. How does the perspective of the speaker change with the stanza breaks? 

Level B

  1. Compare and contrast the tone of the two orations of the midwife. 
  2. How is the everyday world portrayed in the first of these orations?  What is the reason for talking about it in this way here?
  3. What do we know about the Mesoamerican understanding of calendar time and astronomy?  How are these concerns reflected in these two orations?

Level C

  1. Discuss the equations drawn between the new mother and the warrior.  How are the roles of male and female treated here?  Is it significant that these orations are to be spoken by a woman? 
  2. What characteristics of ritual define these two utterances as orations?  Why are they not viewed as poetry? 
  3. Why would a society wish to have set speeches always to be used on occasions as emotionally fraught as the death or the birth of an infant?  Do these orations leave a role for personal feelings? Can you think of any similar situations in today’s world that are eased by the availability of formulaic responses?  What words do we tend to choose in offering condolences to the bereaved?
  4. Read the interpretation of Nahuatl metaphysics in the essay by James Maffie available under Resources and comment on the significance of this assertion in relation to the midwife’s orations:  “Nahuatl philosophy . . . neither conceived of death as inherently evil nor advocated its conquest.”

Focus on Cantares Mexicanos

Level A

  1. Who is the speaker of the Mexican Otomi Song?  How does he view his role?  Are you conscious of a specific personality in the “I” of this poem?
  2. What colors permeate the Mexican Otomi Song?  What is the effect of all the visual references?
  3. Who are the spirit swans and the princes, mentioned in Song XII? 
  4. What combination of qualities makes an eagle jaguar?  How does the speaker’s admiration for eagles and jaguars define the value system of these poems?

Level B

  1. What is the significance of the darkness in Song XII, considering the range of colors preferred by the speaker?  Explore the implications of the contrast between those “whose hearts lie dead asleep in war” and the “sacred flowers of the dawn.”
  2. Discuss the paradoxical meaning of blossoming only “within the city of the eagles” (Song XII, p. 3076).  What kind of place gives rise to life in the vocabulary of the Cantares Mexicanos?

Level C

  1. Compare the view of life in the two warrior songs of the Cantares Mexicanos with the midwife’s orations in the Florentine Codex.   How is true life defined in these texts?
  2. Discuss the functions of repetition in the Nahuatl texts that you are studying.  What kinds of terms tend to be repeated? Are these repetitions primarily to aid the memory of the speaker?  How do they influence the tone of these works?  Compare the use of repetition in the epic tradition.  
  3. Discuss the references to narcotics and intoxication in the Cantares Mexicanos.  What ritual practices may they reflect?  What other poems do you know that celebrate drunkenness?  How would you compare them to these Aztec songs?
  4. Read the interpretation of Nahuatl metaphysics in the essay by James Maffie available under Resources and comment on the significance of this assertion in relation to the Cantares Mexicanos:  “Nahuatl philosophy . . . neither conceived of death as inherently evil nor advocated its conquest.”

Focus on The Epic of Son-Jara

Level A

  1. Why might a narrator begin an epic poem by tracing the hero’s ancestry? 
  2. Where can you find evidence of the mixture of Islamic and magical in The Epic ofSon-Jara?

Level B

  1. Repetition is central to this poem, and it takes several forms.  Analyze the different forms of repetition found throughout the poem, beginning with Sugulun Konde’s prayer in Episode 4 (ll. 1377-1402).  What key words and terms does the hero’s mother emphasize?  How do they give substance to her prayer?  
  2. How does the rhythm of performance profit from the different forms of repetition that you have discussed?  How does repetition establish the values of the poem?

Level C

  1. The Epic of Son-Jara incorporates a variety of traditional oral forms.  Find an example of a proverb, a curse, and a praise song and show how they contribute to the development of the poem’s themes.
  2. Discuss the role of the audience in The Epic of Son-Jara, as indicated by the marginal responses recorded in Johnson’s translation.   What does this feature of the poem suggest about the social significance of African oral epic?  
  3. How conscious are we of the parentage of figures in other epic poetry with which you are familiar?   How would you compare and contrast the ways in which the bard Fa-Digi Sisoko establishes the family relationships of leading characters in The Epic of Son-Jara with the methods used by Homer or the Beowulf poet, among others? Consider the social contexts that give rise to different emphases in these various traditions.
  4. The last line of the epic in this telling calls attention to the power of the word.  Explore the poem for other self-conscious references to the bards’ work (see, for example, the way in which the praise song of the Konde clan reverberates in Episode 3, ll. 667 ff.) and discuss the need for this function in a primarily oral culture.   

Focus on Texts and Contexts

The Funeral Oration of Pericles

Level A

  1. Explain the circumstances that led Pericles to give this oration, one of the most famous speeches in the history of the West.
  2. How does Pericles call upon the past in beginning his speech?  What understanding of Athenian values does he convey in tracing the evolution of the city?

Level B

Compare the view of women expressed by Pericles at the end of his speech with that expressed in the midwife’s orations. 

Level C

  1. The burial of the Athenian war dead is a public ritual.  Pericles, however, pointedly speaks for himself in this funeral oration.  How would you compare the nature and function of oratory in the Aztec texts?
  2. War and death are the subjects of this text as they are of the Cantares Mexicanos in the Anthology.  Compare and contrast the view of mortality and the idea of honor in Athenian and Aztec culture:  is there a figure like the Ever Present, Ever Near of the Mexican songs in the world of Pericles? 

The Meeting of Moctezuma and Cortes:

The Letter of Cortes to the Emperor Charles V

Level A

  1. How does Cortes seem to feel about the ceremonial greeting that he receives upon his entry to the city?  What details does he choose to describe to the Emperor?
  2. How well does Cortes seem to understand the references made by Moctezuma to “this great lord” of whom he is taken to be the representative? 

The Aztec Account of the Meeting

Level A

  1. How does the Aztec account of the meeting differ from that of Cortes?
  2. How does the Aztec account describe the sounds of the Spanish language?

Level B

How do the two different versions of the meeting embody the values of the two civilizations?  How do the Aztecs describe the Spaniards’ response to gold?

Level C

How do the oratorical traditions of Europe and the Americans contribute to the outcome of this encounter?  Do you see any evidence of the contrast between ancient ritual and improvisation that Tzvetan Todorov describes? 

Two Poems by Nezahualcoyotl

Level A

How does the syntax of the two poems attributed to the king Nezahualcoyotl differ from the selections from the Cantares Mexicanos?   (Note that for the reader who does not know the Nahuatl originals, it is difficult to say whether these differences stem from the translations or the nature of the poems themselves.)

Level B

What is the view of death in these poems?  Does it seem consistent with the ideas in the Cantares Mexicanos?  Offer some examples from each to support your opinion.

Level C

The last line of the second poem, “All the earth is a grave,” puts great faith in the power of “the written page” to memorialize the dead.  Look through the various examples of the pictorial tradition in the Discovery section and in Resources and write an essay connecting the visual and the oratorical means of preserving the Mexican past.

African Praise Songs

Level C

  1. Review the categories of praise names offered in this document and analyze the significance of the names given to Son-Jara.
  2. Compose an original praise song for someone you know and write an explanation of the terms you have chosen. 
 
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